The ‘doomsday vault’ may already have met its match in global warming

The Global Seed Vault is sometimes called the doomsday vault, as it is meant to store the Earth’s genetic reward in the event of a natural or human-made calamity that mops out essential crops needed to sustain human and animal populations.

With a capability to store 4.5 million harvest ranges and 2.5 billion seeds, it’s billed as the world’s largest collect of harvest diversity.

While the designers of the vault seem to have taken the possibilities of nuclear conflicts and world pandemics into account, they may have given too little is considered to one other major threats: global warming.

The vault was purposefully created far from being major population centres, and was built 400 feet into an icy mountainside in Spitsbergen, Norway. The seed collect, currently numbering between 800,000 and 900,000 samples, is kept at a chilly temperature of minus-1 8 degrees Celsius, or about 0 degrees Fahrenheit.

Entrance to the Global Seed Vault in Spitsbergen, Norway.

Image: Heiko Junge/ Epa/ REX/ Shutterstock

The frozen clay surrounding the vault, known as permafrost, however, may turn out to be the vault’s undoing as air and sea temperatures rise due to human-caused global warming. According to a report on Friday in The Guardian , a series of highly unusual wintertime heat waves during the 2016 -1 7 winter resulted in enough thawing of the permafrost that sea hastened into the vault’s entrance.

Once inside the entrance, the sea suspend into frost as temperatures cooled again, before any sea could penetrate the vault itself. However, the accident may have been enough to demonstrate that rapid Arctic climate change the region is warming at twice the rate of any other field on Earth could upend key premises used to build the vault, which opened with much fanfare just seven years ago.

Air temperature deviations from average during the Arctic winter of 2016 -1 7.

Image: nsidc

“It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme climate like that, ” Hege Njaa Aschim, from the Norwegian government, which owns the vault, told the Guardian .

“A lot of sea went into the start of the passageway and then it froze to frost, so it was like a glacier when you went in, ” she told the paper.

The seed bank was supposed to operate on autopilot, but right now, laborers are watching it around the clock, Aschim told the UK newspaper. “We must visualize what we can do to minimize all the risks and make sure the seed bank can take care of itself.”

In statements to Mashable on Monday, Aschim said any media tales about “flooding” in the vault were overblown.

“It was not inundating but a lot of rainwater and it’s unusual – we have not experienced that before, ” she said in an email. However, she added, “The seeds and the vault[ were] never at risk.”

High temperatures and heavy rainfall in October 2016 induced “water intrusion” into the passageway leading to the seed vault, she mentioned. Although the seeds were unaffected, she said the Norwegian government, which operates the vault, is consulting with climate researchers and taking other precautions to ensure “we do the right thing to protect the passageway and the vault in the future.”

“We will not take any possibilities, ” Aschim added.

Vault operators are building building improvements to minimize any sea intrusion at the entering to the vault. Some of these determines include the removal of a strength transformer to take away a hot source in the entranceway, as well as delving drainage furrows nearby.

Operators published press statements over the weekend laying out the renovations in detail, building clear that they relate the entranceway to the vault rather than the area where the seeds are stored.

There is no question that the climate is warming faster in all areas of the Svalbard Archipelago than was anticipated simply a couple decades ago.

And the dissolve of permafrost is not just putting the seed vault’s original layout at risk. It is also threatening to increase the rate at which greenhouse gases are pouring into the atmosphere, since as the frozen clay meltings, bacteria within it break down organic materials and exhale methane, carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases. In add-on, permafrost thaw is destabilizing houses, roads, and other infrastructure in the Arctic, from Alaska to Siberia and beyond.

The past year was the warmest on account in the Arctic, and sea frost, which normally surrounds the Svalbard Archipelago, persisted north of the field through much of January, which is unusually late, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

A series of warm air pulsates from the North Atlantic brush across Svalbard, including the site of the seed vault, pushing high temperatures well above the freezing point. Connected to major cyclone structures, these ripples of above average high temperatures then swept across much of the high-pitched Arctic, at times bringing high temperatures near or simply above icing at the geographic North pole as well.

Map of high temperatures deviation from avg. across the Arctic in Dec. 2016, with an arrow drawn attention to Svalbard.

Image: nsidc

This pattern was partly due to a lack of sea frost across the Barents and Kara Seas, which provided a supply of moisture and warm air for these cyclones to tap into and draw into the central Arctic.

For example, on Dec. 21, 2016, the high temperature in Svalbard was 4.8 degrees Celsius, or 40.6 degrees Fahrenheit. This was nearly 19 degrees Celsius above average for the date. Similarly, on Feb. 6, 2017, Svalbard insured a high temperature of five. 9 degrees Celsius, or 42.6 degrees Fahrenheit, well above the average for the date, which was just minus-1 6.1 degrees Celsius, or 3 degrees above zero Fahrenheit.

Ryan Maue, a meteorologist at WeatherBell Analytics in the U.S ., tweeted his feeling about the Guardian story’s accuracy on Friday, saying that if true-blue, the vault must be relocated. However, winter conditions are variable there as climate structures pass through. The field where the vault is situated is not in an area permanently surrounded by sea frost, for example.

On other hand, if rain-on-snow melt-water simply ran into the passageway at bottom of mountain, then it’s a climate event to mitigate.

These extraordinarily mild periods this winter were no longer isolated instances, either, as Svalbard insured more rain on snow occurrences than average, and several other temperature spikes that threatened to break records.

The question now is whether there is anything the seed vault operators can do to bolster the facility’s defenses against climate change and climate extremes, which will simply develop worse in coming years.

One recent study that scrutinized Svalbard climate trends during the past century found substantial winter warming has taken place in the past few decades, and it projected that a typical winter in the year 2100 will be about 10 degrees Celsius milder than those today.

This tale has been updated with statement from the Norwegian government on May 22, 2017.